DS 

515 






THE OLD WORLD IN THE NEW 

By benjamin IDE WHEELER 

[N ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES 

OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 

JUNE 30, 1898 

Reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly for August, 1898 

Copyright, 1898, by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 




Class __=2S^I5 

Book j/f'-H-^ 

Copyright ]^° , 



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THE OLD WORLD IN THE NEW. 



At a French dinner-table, a few years 
ago, I found myself opposite a genial 
English clergyman who was somewhat 
disturbed by the local tendency to quote 
values and spaces in terms of francs and 
centimes, metres and centimetres, instead 
of in the old-established and well -ap- 
proved pounds, shillings, and pence, feet 
and inches. Some attempt was made to 
interest him in the practical convenience 
of the decimal system, and he gave po- 
lite and patient hearing ; but the seed 
fell upon stony ground, where was no 
deepness of earth, and its first fair pro- 
mise soon withered away before an ap- 
peal to the common consciousness of 
man. " I think," said the Englishman, 
addressing his international audience, 
" everybody will have noticed that when 
one has small sums to pay, francs and 
centimes or dollars and cents do well 
enough ; but if any large sum is involved, 
one is always forced, in order really to 
appreciate the amount, to reduce it to 
pounds, shillings, and pence." 

Socrates, in the Phsedo, compares the 
people of his day, who thought their 
world about the ^gean to be the whole, 
to ants and frogs about a marshy pool. 
The ants and the frogs we have ever 
with us. They are antiquarians of Co- 
penhagen to whom Danish history is the 
history of the world. They are the 
school committee men who insist that 
Kansas schools should teach only Kan- 
sas history and Kansas geography and 
Kansas weather. They are the political 
historians who make the world start 



afresh with the Declaration of Independ- 
ence. They are the financial experts 
who ignore the existence of international 
values. They are the three wise men 
of Gotham who went to sea in a bowl. 
All those who do not know that the ex- 
perience of the race is one continuous 
whole, in which dates and boundaries are 
only guide-posts, and not barriers, are 
the ants and frogs of Socrates. With- 
out life perspective and historical per- 
spective there can be no sound political 
judgment, — least of all in these days, 
when mighty world forces are twirhng 
the millstones of the gods, and the gar- 
nerings of the ages are pouring into the 
hopper. 

We are living in great times. Forces 
that have been silently at work for cen- 
turies are just finding their expression. 
The closing years of the nineteenth cen- 
tury are engaged in a process of histori- 
cal liqu^idation by which the debtors and 
creditors of the ages are coming to their 
due. Scarcely have the echoes of the 
last contest died away on the shores of 
the Mgesm, where has been the battle- 
ground and ultimate clearing-house of 
old world issues, when the new world 
issues take their shape and choose their 
battle-ground by the Chinese Ocean. 
Through the trans-Siberian railway Rus- 
sia this year finds for the first time an 
outlet to the open sea, and enters the 
lists foi* the empire of the world. The 
bayonets which in the seventies estab- 
lished a German Empire are now, under 
cover of an understanding with Russia, 



The Old World in the New. 



■VI ^i 



opening a way for German small wares 
in a conquest whose menace is toward 
England. Ill-mated France shares with 
Russia and Germany their policy of re- 
stricted colonial markets, and toys with 
colonizing schemes for which she has 
more money and ambition than men. 
The worn-out states and peoples of the 
old world are passing through bank- 
ruptcy. Africa is being rapidly appor- 
tioned as spoil. The English Empire, in 
consciousness of isolation and peril, 
draws its own bonds closer, and awakes 
to tardy recognition of its Western kins- 
men, of their strength and of their kin- 
ship of purpose. The United States of 
America find themselves forced, whe- 
ther they will or not, to transmute their 
policy of resisting intrusion into one of 
assuming the positive responsibilities of 
a moral hegemony in the West. With- 
in three years the entire strategic map 
of international politics has been made 
anew. Alsace-Lorraine and Constanti- 
nople no longer represent the burning 
questions of diplomacy. New issues and 
vastly larger fields of action have been 
opened. Three years ago, we felt that 
our own international issues, so far as 
they existed, had little relation to the 
great world's worry. To-day, we are, 
for good or bad, in the midst of it all. 

Intercommunication and rapid transit 
have been steadily drawing the ends of 
the earth together. Silent, mighty forces 
have long been assembling to the melt- 
ing-pot the stubborn forms and patterns 
of the older world. Suddenly the fire 
is lighted. 

Lord Rosebery, while Premier of Eng- 
land, made in Parliament the following 
statement : " We have hitherto been fa- 
vored with one Eastern Question, which 
we have always endeavored to lull as 
something too portentous for our imagi- 
nation ; but of late a Far Eastern Ques- 
tion has been superadded, which, I con- 
fess, to my apprehension is in the dim 
vistas of futurity infinitely graver than 
even that question of which we have hith- 



erto known." Four years are not past, 
and " the dim vistas of futurity " have 
become the arena of the present, and the 
Far Eastern Question is at the doors of 
England and at our own. It is a ques- 
tion in which all the world is involved. 
The centre of disturbance may be now 
in China, now in Cuba, now in the Phil- 
ij^pines, but the disturbances are all in 
sympathy. It is a question in which the 
whole history of our race is involved. 
Its tangled movements viewed simply 
in their shifting surface phases yield, 
however, no intelligible statement. They 
concern too vast an area, too long a tra- 
dition ; they cannot be understood from 
the levels of the present. One must seek 
high ground, for they tell their meaning, 
they betray the outlines of their plot, only 
in terms of the world labor, — the drama 
of the history of the race. For great 
areas and mighty upheavals the geologist 
must run the gamut from Archaean and 
Cambrian to Pleistocene. To-day, in a 
sense that never before was true, the old, 
the oldest world of man is sole compe- 
tent interpreter of the new. 

When in the year 326 b. c. Alexan- 
der the Great stayed his eastward march 
in northwestern India at the Sutlej, and 
turned his course down the Indus to seek 
the sea, a boundary line was fixed and 
set which proved to mean for the history 
of the human race more than any ever 
created by the act of man. The eastern 
boundary of Alexander's empire, running 
from the Jaxartes River, a tributary of 
the Sea of Aral, southward along the 
Pamir ranges, " the roof of the world," 
to the Indus, and then on to the Indian 
Ocean, divided the world and its history 
into two utterly distinct parts. 

The portion which lay to the east with 
its two great centres, India and China, 
and which to-day includes a little over 
half the jjopulation of the globe, had no 
lot nor share in the life and history of 
the western part, which we may call our 
Nearer World. In the long process of 
mixture and fermentation which history 



The Old World in the New. 



has suffered since Alexander's time, all 
the elements within this Nearer World, 
stretching from Afghanistan and Persia 
to the shores of western Europe, have 
yielded their contribution, small or great, 
to the civilization upon which our mod- 
ern life is based. The history which 
we study, whether of events, institutions, 
ideas, or religions, has all been a history 
of this Nearer World. 

India and China went their own way. 
The Nearer World knew little of them, 
gave little to them, received little from 
them, until after the discovery of the 
route around the Cape of Good Hope. 
The intercourse opened by that narrow 
way is, in the twentieth century, to tread 
the three broad highways of the Suez 
Canal, the trans - Siberian railway, the 
Pacific route, which represent, respective- 
ly, England, Russia, America. England, 
by the Canadian Pacific, shares the Pa- 
cific route, and she must soon open an- 
other by rail from the Mediterranean to 
the head of the Persian Gulf. 

Alexander's boundary was not a boun- 
dary of race. It ran across the bands 
of blood; A section of the Aryan race, 
isolated behind its barriers, became the 
dominant caste and the rulers of India, 
and developed or administered there a 
form of life and thought utterly distinct 
from any other product of the Aryan tem- 
per. It was a boundary set in the his- 
toric life of man. How real it was the 
distribution of the great religious faiths 
of the world will tell. Political institu- 
tions and boundaries fade and shift ; no- 
thing human yields so permanent a map 
as faith. The conquests of religions are 
chiefly those of name and outward form. 
Unless the population changes, the faith 
in substance abides. 

To the east of Alexander's boundary 
will be found Hinduism, Buddhism, Con- 
fucianism ; to the west, two systems born 
out of the soil of Alexander's empire, 
one of the west, Christianity, the other 
of the east, Mohammedanism, — both of 
them, in history and outward guise of 



statement, the products of Semitism. If 
a map of the world should be colored 
so as to represent the predominant re- 
ligions of different regions, it would ap- 
pear that Mohammedanism reaches its 
eastern frontier essentially at the line 
drawn from the Jaxartes along the 
" roof of the world " and down the 
course of the Indus ; that is, at Alexan- 
der's old frontier. Its territory repre- 
sents the oriental or non-occidental por- 
tion of Alexander's empire. It is itself 
merely a second growth on western 
Asiatic soil, a revival and reassertion of 
orientalism in the reaction from Euro- 
pean conquest. And yet, when com- 
pared with the fundamental thought of 
the systems grown in India and China, 
it shows itself a creation of our world, 
and not of the remoter one. 

Upon our colored map we should find, 
further, that the territory of Eastern 
Christianity corresponds in general to 
the sphere of influence of ancient Athens 
and Byzantium ; that the territory of Ro- 
man Catholicism corresponds to the do- 
main of the Western Roman Empire, — 
Italy, the Spanish Peninsula, France, 
and the Rhine and Danube valleys of 
Central Europe ; while the old Germani, 
who withstood the legions of Drusus and 
Varus, are represented still by the indi- 
vidualistic Protestants of the north. 

The civilization of the Nearer World 
had its birth in the two centres Egypt 
and Babylonia. It was in the long 
river valleys of the Nile and the Eu- 
phrates that the two types of ordered 
life we call by the names Egyptian and 
Assyrian gained their strength and their 
individuality. Their meeting-place and 
agora was the eastern Mediterranean, 
its coast lands and islands. Here the 
resultant of the Mesopotamian and 
Egyptian civilizations united as a female 
principle with the virility of European 
occidentalism, and the fruit was that civ- 
ilization upon which European history, 
and all the history we have hitherto 
cared for, is based. 



The Old World in the New. 



Consciousness of the power of individ- 
ual initiative has been throughout the 
characteristic feature in occidentalism ; 
passive conformity to the ordinance of 
fate and the settled order of the world, 
the spirit of orientalism. The West is 
aggressive, the East passive ; the West 
finds the source of creation and action 
in the individual, the East in the govern- 
ing power, be it state or fate. The West 
looks outward, and seeks to comprehend 
and control the material universe of its 
environment ; the East looks within, and, 
learning from the winds and the stars 
only the lessons of moral order and the 
mandates of destiny imposed upon the 
soul, seeks to know and control the things 
of the spirit. 

In this fabric of the Nearer World 
joined of the West and the East, the 
East supplied the informing spirit, the 
ordered hf e, the civilization ; the West, 
the moving will and the arm of power. 
First Greece, then Rome, then in their 
turn the peoples of the north, assumed 
the leadership. Fresh blood of will and 
empire was drawn constantly from the 
north. But, however empire might 
change, the old frontier between the 
West and the nearer East tended to 
maintain itself where it was when his- 
tory dawned, — at the ^Egean and the 
Bosporus. Two years ago all eyes 
were turned toward the ^gean. Crete, 
Greece, Constantinople, and the Turk 
were words on every lip. All issues of 
international politics were quoted solely 
in terms of the old Bosporus question. 
The history of the Nearer World had 
simply gone back for another bout on 
the old field, — the field on wliich the 
first contests were fought, and to which 
most of the contests since have been re- 
ferred in real or spectred battle. 

Viewing history in the large, we can- 
not fail to see that the world we live 
in is essentially a Mediterranean world. 
All its fundamental forms and moulds 
for law and government, art, architec- 
ture, and literature, thought and faith, 



were created beside the Mediterranean ; 
all its political and religious struggles, 
all its wars, were the fighting over of 
old Mediterranean questions ; and as a 
system of types and forms, it never can 
be really understood and known except 
as it be reduced to Mediterranean terms, 
and studied in the perspective of a Ro- 
man, Greek, or Syrian horizon. 

Such was the life habit of the Near- 
er World. To-day all this has changed. 
Suddenly the centre of interest has 
shifted from the ^gean to the Yellow 
Sea. A class of questions has arisen, 
overwhelming, in the magnitude of the 
issues they involve, all the great ques- 
tions of earlier days, and none of them 
admits solution in terms of the Medi- 
terranean ; none of them concerns the 
Mediterranean, or its peoples, or its 
history. That which the silent course 
of events has long been preparing, now 
in the fullness of time is come. Almost 
without a sign of warning we are trans- 
ferred from the history of the Nearer 
World to the history of the Great 
World, and to that history the life and 
the interests of the great dominant peo- 
ples of the earth will hereafter belong. 

To no people is the transition of more 
profound and fundamental importance 
than to the people of the United States. 
It involves for them nothing less than a 
rethinking of the entire problem of na- 
tional purpose, destiny, and duty. 

The old history, which we have called 
the history of the Nearer World, dealt 
with the antagonisms and the blending 
of its two component factors, occidental- 
ism and orientalism ; the new history 
will record the process of assimilation 
which follows the uniting of the two 
halves of the whole world. There can 
be no question as to which of the two 
will conquer and control, according to 
the external forms of conquest ; but it 
is idle for us, in the light of historical 
experience, to imagine that the blending 
is to mean nothing more than the absorp- 
tion of the East by the West, — nothing 



The Old World in the JSfew. 



more than the exploitation of China and 
India by the greed and power, or even 
the enlightenment, of Western nations- 
Rome conquered Greece, but was con- 
quered by its art, its manners, and its 
thought. Europe, in the form of Greece, 
and then of Rome, subjugated Asia ; but 
Asiatic wealth and luxury reshaped Eu- 
ropean life, and Europe has its religion 
from the conquered people. We may 
easily underestimate the solidity of these 
civilizations we confront, and the perma- 
nence of their forms of life and of their 
moulds of thought. The economic con- 
ditions, the political ideas, and the funda- 
mental religious and philosophic thought 
of our world cannot and will not escape, 
in the great leveling that is to come, the 
most far-reaching and momentous trans- 
formation. England has touched yet 
only the surface of India, merely the hem 
of the garment ; but her commerce, the 
equipment of her life, her governmental 
mechanism and ideals, have already been 
radically influenced, and the marvelous 
effect which acquaintance with Hindu 
thought is exercising upon men's funda- 
mental thought of the world has spread 
far beyond the circles of the learned and 
of the faddists, and, I am persuaded, can 
be estimated in its profound importance 
only by the historians of later days. 

Both India and China embody types of 
life and forms of thought which, strange 
and incomprehensible as they may be to 
us, have been shapen and polished in 
the mills of a human experience repre- 
senting in composite the experience of 
more human souls than have elsewhere 
shared a common life. 

India is the land of the vast and the 
boundless, the true motherland of the ro- 
mantic. Endlessly prolific, she sets no 
restraint on the imagination. So India 
lacks that which was to the Greek, as the 
representative occidental, the supremest 
virtue, temperate control, — " naught to 
excess." The tumid, redundant forms 
of her art, as of her literature and her 
theogony, attest the absence of that sense 



of due economy and fitness which made 
the creations of the Greek eternal models 
of restraint and harmony. To the ag- 
gressive occidental, time is the opportu- 
nity of action, time is money ; for the 
Hindu, there were no days or years, and 
hence no history. 

The occidental is a pluralist ; person- 
alities, individual psyches, are for him 
the starting-points, the prime factors of 
the universe ; to enforce personality and 
make it effective is the mission of life. 
The Hindu is a monist ; the world-all 
is the starting-point ; personality is an 
aberration from it ; to bring this person- 
ality back to rest, absorbed into accord 
with the world-all, is the toil and mission 
of life. Knowledge is the recipe of sal- 
vation ; ignorance is the sin. 

China is another cosmos. It is pre- 
eminently the land of the practical. Its 
world is the established social order of 
men fixed in forms and conventions, 
whose authority is absolute, as their rea- 
sons are past finding out. Life is a 
drama. Men merely play parts. The 
" look-see " (appearance) and the " make- 
see " (delusive persuasion) constitute the 
substance of life. The starting-point and 
whole of things is neither the world-all 
nor the individual soul, but the stage and 
scenery and plot into which the individ- 
ual must fit the action of his part, and 
within which take his role. There is no 
truth, no real. 

With the Greek it is intemperance or 
" slopping over " which is the sin, with 
the Hindu ignorance, with the Chinaman 
innovation. The purpose of education 
is, for the Greek, to give personality 
its maximum of effectiveness ; for the 
Hindu, to endow it with a knowledge 
that shall reveal the hindrances to union 
with the world-all ; for the Chinaman, 
to force the individuality, like a Chinese 
girl's foot into a shoe, into the fixed role 
or craft it must use in this present life. 
The Greek education is frankly the lib- 
eral education ; the Chinese, frankly pro- 
fessional and technical. 



6 



The Old World in the New. 



China has perhaps one fourth the pop- 
ulation of the globe, but no one suspects 
it of schemes of imperial conquest. The 
"yellow clanger" menacing the world 
comes not from the thrifty tradesmen 
and peasants of China. China is a na- 
tion without a fist. Its people are lack- 
ing in any idea or motive around which 
could be assembled the sentiments of pa- 
triotism. Devotion to the honoring of 
ancestors and solicitude for private gain 
are the two sentiments of a people who 
constitute, not a nation nor a state, but a 
scheme of living. 

The new history is to be concerned, 
then, with the assimilation of these two 
strange and mutually diverse elements of 
the farther world to the substance of the 
nearer world, — just as the old world 
history involved an assimilation of West 
and East. With the parallel goes also a 
contrast. The old history centred about 
an inland sea. All its issues had their 
ultimate home by the Mediterranean. 
In the new history the world is turned 
wrong side out. The outer ocean is the 
agora. Power is estimated in terms of 
navies rather than of armies. Coal is 
king, and coaling-stations mark the bonds 
of empire as the Roman military roads 
did of old. The pattern of the world 
has been turned inside out. The old 
world, like an ancient house, was built to- 
ward the inside and its colonnaded court ; 
the new is built toward the outside, with 
windows and veranda. 

The old history had its Eastern Ques- 
tion ; the new has its Easternmost Ques- 
tion. In the later phases of the old, 
Turkey was the "sick man;" in the 
new, it is China ; and where the car- 
cass is, there are the eagles gathered to- 
gether. The old involved the constant 
query who should be the leader of the 
Occident, — Greece, Rome, France, Ger- 
many, England, Russia ? The new asks 
who shall hold the empire and lead the 
civilization of the world ; shall it be the 
Slav, the Teuton, or the Latin ? 

The aggressiveness shown by France 



in colonial enterprise is scarcely more 
than artificial ; it represents no inner 
need or impulse except as it be a yearn- 
ing for bonds and shares. France is 
reaUy smitten with the palsy of her own 
prudence and thrift. Families are small. 
Sons are not put through the school of 
self-reliance. A nation lacking men who 
know how to take risks and assume the 
responsibility of their own choices can- 
not compete for leadership among the 
peoples. French is the language of a 
diplomacy which lives on in the close at- 
mosphere of the old Mediterranean con- 
troversies ; out in the breezy ocean world, 
the greater world, the medium of inter- 
national intercourse tends to be English. 
A colder-blooded people than any of 
the Latin race will win the contest, in 
these days of organization and calcula- 
tion and mechanism and coal. The Ger- 
man is patient enough and practical 
enough. He is, like his Anglo-Saxon 
brother by nature, a stout champion of 
individual freedom, but he lacks some- 
thing his brother possesses. This some- 
thing it is not easy to describe, but the 
lack of it allows him to tolerate the yoke 
of Caesarism, imported from the Latin 
world ; gives him ready adaptability to 
the institutions of other peoples, so that 
he is quickly absorbed ; and, most char- 
acteristic of all, forbids his appreciation 
of a game like football. 

The character in which the English- 
man asserts his right to rule an empire 
is the character demanded by this most 
truly Anglo-Saxon sport. It is made up 
of roughness, willingness to risk, absence 
of supersensitiveness, fearful directness, 
and a sublime devotion to fair play. The 
typical Englishman believes iia venturing, 
hard hitting, blunt truth-telling, equal 
justice, and personal cleanliness- 
England had the start of Continental 
Europe in preparing for the issues of the 
new history, in that the English Chan- 
nel enabled her to free herself eai*ly from 
the more baneful entanglements of the 
Mediterranean quarrels. England has 



The Old World in the New. 



long been living in the world whose 
agora is the open seas. Not until these 
last days of the nineteenth century, how- 
ever, has her one prosjiective rival, Rus- 
sia, been able to find a way out into the 
world. This vast power, spanning at 
the north half the globe, was until this 
year pent up as an inland state. Arch- 
angel and the Baltic ports are ice-blocked 
for a portion of the year. Vladivostok, 
founded in 1858, and afterward selected 
as a terminus for the Siberian railway, is 
closed to navigation four months in each 
year. Odessa is blocked at the Bosporus. 

England has diligently kept the barri- 
ers up between Russia and the sea. In 
1878 she checked her at the gates of 
Constantinople ; in 1886, when Russia 
was in control of the passes of the Hin- 
du-Kush, and could see her way out to 
the ocean by way of Afghanistan, Brit- 
ish power again raised the dykes, and 
since then the occupation by England of 
the Mekran and the Chitral valley has 
set a double rampart against Russian ad- 
vance. It remains yet for England to 
occupy the Persian Gulf, and join it by 
rail to the coast where Beaconsfield set 
Cyprus on guard. 

The events attending the Chinese- 
Japanese war were of most serious con- 
sequence to England's policy and*inter- 
est. Before the war began, she was the 
trusted adviser of China, and her pro- 
tector against Russian aggression. Be- 
fore the war ended, England found her- 
self identified with Japan, a nation she 
had underestimated too long, and sud- 
denly came to appreciate. Russia, sup- 
ported by her associates, Germany and 
France, assumed the role of protecting 
friend discarded by England, checked 
and nullified the victory of Japan, and 
China is now almost her vassal. That 
which it has been the constant aim of 
English diplomacy and power for years 
to prevent has come about within this 
year. Russia has a harbor in the Yel- 
low Sea, has gained a foothold on the 
shore of the iceless ocean. The astute- 



ness of Li Hung Chang, on the other 
hand, has seen' the way for bringing the 
product of Chinese industry to the West- 
ern world by the overland route, and 
China is to be introduced to the West by 
help and intermediation of Russia. Here- 
in lies the quid pro quo. 

Russia's strength is in her geographic 
position. Unmenaced in the rear, span- 
ning Europe and Asia, and knowing no 
difference between them, she bides her 
time, and slowly pushes her way south 
like a mighty glacier. Gradually the 
barriers give way. Germany, which once 
held her in check at the west, is now — 
thanks to Bismarck's anti-English policy, 
continued by the young Emperor — in 
league with her and in commercial war 
with England. In Continental diplomacy 
she is supreme arbiter. Panslavism and 
the Eastern Church have carried her 
around Constantinople almost to the 
shores of the ^gean, and the first oppor- 
tunity of England's preoccupation will 
give her exit through the Bosporus. 
Steadily she works her way into Central 
Asia, where the half-oriental temper of 
her people makes her government pecu- 
liarly acceptable, and her administration 
in general fortunate and wise. 

Entered in the lists for the world 
empire are, then, these two. The con- 
flict is set for which generations have 
been preparing. Where is our place ? 
Russia is our old-time friend. When- 
ever we have been at issue with Eng- 
land, Russia has lost no opportunity to 
show sympathy with us. England is a 
mother who has constantly ignored or 
underestimated us. With a blindness 
of vision almost unparalleled in all the 
stupidities of statesmanship, her ruling 
class have committed wrong after wrong 
against us, in slight and misjudgment and 
selfishness, all culminating in the attitude 
toward us during the war for the pre- 
servation of the Union. But the heart 
of the great English middle class has 
always been right. The English com- 
mon man, with a fine consciousness of 



The Old World in the New. 



affinity, regards us as his own, and re- 
joices in the American states as a crea- 
tion and vindication of his own kind. 
The English country squire is fading 
away, and the plain commoner is com- 
ing to a hearing. And we are of one 
kind. When the battle is set between 
the Slav and the Anglo-Saxon, our hearts 
prove us inheritors of more than Anglo- 
Saxon blood : we are inheritors of the 
principles embodied in Anglo-Saxon life. 

The Slav stands for government which 
has the sanctions of its authority from 
above and without ; the Anglo-Saxon, for 
one whose authority has its source in 
the governed themselves. One follows 
the rule of exjjediencies, and holds that 
what succeeds is right ; the other builds 
solid achievement on the things that are 
real, and believes in the blunt word of 
truth. One raises the barriers of re- 
stricted privilege ; the other opens the 
markets and the courts of the world to 
equal opportunity and even justice. One 
builds on the distrust of the purposes 
and the intelligence of men ; the other, 
upon the high optimism of democracy. 
To one the state is a prison or strait- 
jacket ; to the other it is the training- 
school of the race, where responsibility 
begets character, and free opportunity 
begets content. 

There can be no doubt of our sympa- 
thy, — what is our duty ? Has the new 
order of the world brought us new obli- 
gations of duty ? The old world linger- 
ing in the meshes of Mediterraneanism 
afforded us no interests but such as we 
might well wish to shun with all their " en- 
tangling alliances." The barrier of the 
ocean removed us from the old world 
gathered about its inland sea, and set us 
apart in the far West at one side of the 
earth. The utilization of this barrier 
has afforded us the opportunity for es- 
tablishing ourselves in possession and use 
of our soil, and for developing our re- 
sources and our system of government. 

But now the old world has passed. 
History is turned inside out. The outer 



ocean is the agora ; the whole world, not 
half, is involved ; and instead of being, 
as in the old order of things, far at one 
side, we stand full in the midst, — mid- 
way between Europe and its goal in the 
Farther East. Sooner than any pro- 
phet could have foreseen, the question is 
upon us. 

Our old-time policy of resisting arbi- 
trary European interference in the af- 
fairs of American peoples has been ex- 
tended, under the pressure of what we 
believe is a genuine humanitarian senti- 
ment, into intervention against a Euro- 
pean misgovernment in Cuba which had 
passed the limits of toleration, and, hav- 
ing ceased to be government, had become 
a case of arbitrary interference in the 
course of American events. 

The moment we took this step we be- 
came involved in the great world pro- 
blems. England's position in the Far 
East hurried her to our side, and gave us 
her welcome to participation in wider 
responsibilities for the order of the world. 
England and America, alienated in terms 
of the Nearer World's life, have found 
each other on the field of the Greater 
World. They belong together, and their 
union means not only a check to the Rus- 
sian menace, but peace and the orderly 
development of civilization in the world. 

Many of us deplored the Spanish war ; 
many of us now look forward with anx- 
ious solicitude concerning the effect of 
victory on the victor ; but still, as we 
survey the movements of human history 
in the large, we cannot fail to see in all 
that is occurring the inevitable grist of 
the mills of the gods and the irrefragable 
judgments of the Weltgericht. Spain 
and the Middle Ages could not tarry in 
the West. We, on the other hand, could 
not shut ourselves within the walled gar- 
dens of our pleasant domesticity, and 
shun responsibilities that the commerce 
and intercourse of the larger world ex- 
act of those who stand for order and 
equal justice in the affairs of men. 

While, then, we may well be called 



TJie Old World in the, New. 



9 



upon now to readjust our conception of 
national purpose and duty to the new 
order and our new position, we dare not 
be false to ourselves or our past. Our 
charter and creed we must interpret, if 
no longer in the letter, then all the more 
scrupulously in the spirit. However the 
letter and the form may fade and vanish 
away, there are some things that must 
needs abide. A nation proclaiming gov- 
ernment of the people and for the peo- 
ple cannot impose on conquered peoples 
a foreign sway, or one that finds its su- 
preme motive in the benefits accruing to 
others than the governed. We must 
stand as we were founded, a nation that 
draws diverse interests and diverse com- 
munities into peaceful cooperation under 



recognition of the rights of the individual 
man, and the self-government of peoples 
and states. 

Conquest and empire, and all that be- 
longs thereto both of method and of idea, 
are utterly abhorrent to the theory of 
those institutions through which America 
has aspired to enlighten the world, and 
utterly foreign to the structure our fa- 
thers reared out of their stony griefs and 
cemented with their faith. 

It is character that counts in nations 
as in individuals. Only in loyalty to the 
old can we serve the new ; only in un- 
derstanding of the past can we interpret 
and use the present ; for history is not 
made, but unfolded, and the old world 
entire is ever present in the new. 

Benjamin Ide Wheeler. 



.r^%.,i 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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